Why codes are cool

SOMEWHAT surprisingly for a subject that relies on complex mathematics, cryptography—the study of secret codes and ciphers—is enjoying a wave of popularity. Filming for “Enigma”, a movie based on Robert Harris's bestselling novel set among second-world-war codebreakers at Bletchley Park, is due to start this month. “Cryptonomicon”, Neal Stephenson's epic novel linking wartime and modern-day codebreakers, has become an international bestseller. “The Code Book”, a bestselling history of codes and ciphers written by Simon Singh, is now being turned into a television series.

British cryptomaniacs have been able to feed their passion in recent months by visiting the British Museum's “Cracking Codes” exhibition, attending a tie-in lecture given by a cryptographical guru, Whitfield Diffie (one of the co-inventors of public-key encryption, which is used to secure Internet transactions), and then curling up in front of the television to watch “Station X”, Channel 4's three-part series about Bletchley Park. Not to mention reading the accompanying book.

Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard law professor, has weighed in with “Code, and other laws of cyberspace”, a hefty tome that examines questions of privacy, secrecy and the protection of intellectual property on the Internet, all of which are intricately bound up with cryptography. Computer scientist Clifford Pickover has published “Cryptorunes”, which mixes historical anecdotes with code-cracking puzzles. And Sarah Flannery, an Irish teenager who made a name for herself last year by inventing a new encryption algorithm, has just published an autobiography entitled “In Code”. It is even tempting to conclude that the new edition of P.G. Wodehouse's book “The Code of the Woosters”, being published next month, may be an attempt to cash in on the popularity of anything with the word “code” in its title.

Clearly, the whole subject of cryptography, from the cracking of the Enigma cipher during the second world war to the latest developments in computer security, is something people want to know about. Codes have become cool. But why now?

Simon Singh believes that the popularity of all things cryptographical results from the confluence of two separate trends. Interest in the Enigma story, he says, has been rekindled as historians and documentary makers have rushed to record first-hand accounts from the surviving participants before it is too late. At the same time, the rise of the Internet means that cryptography has suddenly become a feature of everyday life for many people, as they worry about the safety of tapping credit-card details and so on into their web browsers. Both of these developments have fuelled public interest.

Some people evidently take their enthusiasm for the subject too far. On April 1st an Enigma cipher machine was stolen from a display case at Bletchley Park. At first, the theft was thought to be a prank, but it now seems otherwise. The machine was of a particularly rare type used by German military intelligence, called an Abwehr Enigma, of which only a handful survive. Since this would make the machine very difficult to sell, it suggests that it may have been stolen to order for a collector. An Enigma, indeed.